


Heautoscopy

by Aloysia_Virgata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s11e03 Plus One, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 08:11:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13430592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aloysia_Virgata/pseuds/Aloysia_Virgata
Summary: Reflections and reflections





	Heautoscopy

**Author's Note:**

> For Perplexistan, who asked.

Too old for pretty, she thinks. But striking. She’ll grant herself striking. Lines at her mouth, crow’s feet around her Bette Davis eyes. Face and nose too sharp for all-American beauty, but she knows her good points. Her hair is thick, and Pantene-shiny. **  
**

Dried-up, Judy had said. Scully thinks of skeletonized bodies in shallow graves, nothing but a hard white frame when the soft flesh withers away. The forensic anthropologists and sculptors step in, marking tissue depths with tiny pegs, kneading soft clay into a human mask to give life to those dead beyond death.

She pictures herself that way, knows they’d check her pelvis and ribcage for sex, the pubic symphysis for childbirth. They’d get a face but not a life, the body still trying to tell its story

How much we long to be seen.

***

Mulder chuckly on the bed, her body dipping towards the depression his has made in the mattress. She rolls towards him the way smaller bodies fall into orbit around larger ones, tucking into their gravity wells in the fluid fabric of space.

Dog years, he’d said, and she was charmed enough not to lecture him on the misperception.A woman thinks about these things, she’d told him with arch certainty. Is it true? It might be. She doesn’t know many women.

The trouble with beauty, as with anything precious, is that one can lose it.

When he leaves, she strips naked and hangs her clothing in the small closet. Scully stands before the mirror, touches her scars. She lifts her arms, one at a time, and examines the curve of her breasts. Her nipples are puckered, and there is gooseflesh beneath the fluorescent light. Scully turns sideways, studies the dip of her belly and swell of her gluteals, the tuft of rusty hair between her thighs. She rises on her toes in imaginary heels.

She shivers and slides her pajamas over her skin, unwound cocoons woven back together and dyed the color of India ink. Scully wonders if she too is transformed.

***

“I can’t sleep, Mulder,” she’d said with faint petulance. Sometimes she feels most alive in the small hours, keeping the wicked things afoot in the world at bay with him. Her circadian rhythm is long disrupted, recharging herself in fits and starts through the decades.

The sheets are surprisingly rich for such an out of the way place as the St.Rachel, with the gloss of beaten egg whites. She’d asked him to hold her, pleased at her own frankness. She may not be old, but she’s certainly too old to be coy.

It’s good here against the dense heat of his body, his shirt ribby through her silk top. His breath tickles the small hairs on her neck, winds down her collar along her back. They’re looped, she and Mulder, entangled at the quantum level, and she’s warm and safe because he is.

Mulder snuffles into her hair, making her laugh. “I can feel you thinking,” he murmurs.

“Mmm,” she says. “Always thinking. Just mulling over what comes after all this, I guess.”

“How existential are we talking, Scully? The great, grand this in the cosmic sense? If so, I don’t think I can drown out the sound of 50 years of nuns. If you mean this particular moment, I’ve got some ideas.” He drops a hand to her ass, squeezes.

She turns to face him, her eyes soft. “Somewhere in between. You’ve got mandatory retirement next year unless Skinner grants you an extension. But that’s sixty-five, max. He’ll probably split the difference and give you sixty.”

He smiles, brushes the hair off her cheek. “So you’re worried about me being out to pasture? Am I looking that rough these days, Doc?”

Scully sighs, frustrated. “No. I don’t know, I just…I’ve seen you when you’re not working, Mulder. You get restless and it’s, well, it’s not good for you.” She doesn’t talk about herself, doesn’t talk about what happens when she gets restless. How she runs and needs him to hold her still.

“My blog was tremendously popular, I’ll remind you.”

She snorts. “Case in point.”

“Ahh, Scully. No, I think retirement will be okay. I plan to become part of the underground revolution that will have inevitably formed to topple the equally inevitable Trump autocracy. Gonna wear a lot of earth tones.”

Scully smiles, traces his lips with a fingertip. “Yeah? And what will I be doing?”

“Oh, well. You’ll be part of the secret government resistance, led by the Park Service. You’ll be wearing something chic and black, of course.” He strokes her sleeve.

How good it would be to stay forever here in this little nest, how good to bump noses and twine fingers like teenagers. How good to feel such happiness.

“I like this, Mulder,” she says. “It’s much better than the average midlife crisis. Porsche and a twenty-four year old cocktail waitress.”

He guffaws. “I wouldn’t know what to do with either one. Besides, I’m well past midlife.”

Scully tucks her head beneath his chin to hide her face. He runs his hands along her back, smelling of all his toiletries and the bone-deep pheremones that jolt the pleasure centers of her brain.

“Have you, ah, ever taken either one for a test drive?” she mumbles into his chest.

“Scully?”

“Yeah?”

“What’s going on?”

Scully burrows closer, cheeks aflame. “It’s been rocky over the years. I just wonder sometimes if you just thought it would be easier to…I don’t know. Some pretty girl who wants kids and a yard, I guess. You still could, when you retire.”

“Do you think it would be easier?” he asks softly. “Is that what you want me to want? You have this deep-seated misconception that suffering and sacrifice can purify, Scully, but it’s not true. You have to let it go.”

Scully plays with a loose thread on his shirt. “Okay.”

“Liar.”

She manages a small laugh. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Why now?” he asks, voice gentle as a summer rainshower. “We’ve had versions of this conversation before, Scully. The whole if you love something let it go spiel.”

Scully splays her fingers over his bicep. “Mmm, I don’t know. Menopause, maybe. Just feeling my age, I guess.”

She hasn’t told him any more about her visions of William, their son’s gas-flame eyes boring into hers across a kind of tesseract. She hasn’t told him how essential it is to find the boy (young man, really) because of what’s coming. It seems generous to spare him this, as though she is a goddess granting a boon. It can be her burden.

Mulder smoothes his hand over her hair. “Well, we’ve fulfilled my biological imperative, if that makes your little robot brain feel more at ease. Our genes are out in the world. And safe because of your actions.”

She nods, a sharp jerk of her head. “I know.”

“So you’re stuck with me,” he says, peppering her face with small kisses. “And my boring car.”

“I get my hair colored every three weeks,” she says, slightly breathless.

He pulls back, puzzled. “Okay.”

“I suppose we all have images of ourselves frozen in our minds. And in mine, my hair is red. I don’t think I’m horribly vain in general, but I need my hair red.” Scully can’t possibly explain why this is important, but she feels better after saying it.

“You’d be gorgeous if you had a blue mohawk,” he says. “But it’s your hair. Do whatever you want. Though I confess that I have a preference for it being long enough to use as makeshift reins.

She reaches for the waistband of his boxers. “You’re stuck with me too.”

He planes his hands in loose circles over her scapulae, slides them around to unfasten her buttons. “Giddyup, buttercup,” he says.

Scully laughs, a real one this time, and wriggles out of her pajamas. “You know we’re on the taxpayers’ dime right now.”

“We’re taxpayers,” he observes, thumb at her navel. “Tweet James Comey - I bet he’ll approve.”

There is such joy inside her at times, joy that he stirs in her, and Scully wonders what on earth she had been thinking. He moves inside her like a symphony in major key.


End file.
